


Notes on the Cultures of Orzammar

by iodhadh



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Codex Entries (Dragon Age), Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarves, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-08 16:26:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8851903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iodhadh/pseuds/iodhadh
Summary: Being a collection of arguments, extrapolations, suppositions, theories, and (when all else fails) unsupported but firmly held beliefs on the cultures of the dwarves of Orzammar, chiefly but not exclusively of the casteless class.





	1. On Casteless Tattooing Traditions

**Author's Note:**

> A series of interrelated metas, cleaned up and crossposted from tumblr. [Visit me there!](http://iodhadh.tumblr.com)
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: classist oppression, state violence, violence against children, and dehumanization (inasmuch as that term can accurately be applied to dwarves).

Here's something short, to start us off: the first of what I hope will be many such chapters on dwarven culture. There aren't that many of us dedicated dwarf fans out there, which means I've rarely if ever seen any sort of in-depth hypothesizing on the intricacies of their society. Well, if Bioware and the fandom aren't going to give me the content I desire, I'll be over here, piecing together elaborate headcanons from scraps. The least I can do is share it with everyone else.

Let's begin. According to canonical lore, all casteless children are marked with a tattoo shortly after their birth—a brand, meant to indicate their non-status. All right, fair enough: we never see a casteless dwarf without one.

But there are a couple of problems with this. The first is logistics: how do they catch everyone, especially given the long-established fact that the Shaperate doesn't tack casteless lineage? And the second has to do with the mechanics of tattooing—the simple fact is that any mark placed on a baby's face would be faded and stretched long before they reached adulthood. And yet all the casteless we see have the same mark—clear, geometric, and distinctive. So what's going on here?

Let's set aside the fact that it's probably just a case of a modelling shortcut to keep the engine from being overloaded, or the game devs not fully thinking through all the little details (there's a lot to manage in a setting like Thedas, worldbuilding is a tough job, it happens). But let's work with what we've got. We're dealing with a culture that brands an entire subset of its children at birth, a brand that also has to be clear in adulthood—just to make sure everyone knows that its bearer isn't a real person. There has to be a way to manage that.

Turns out there is!

Step one is dealing with branding the babies. We'll want to give the parents incentive to volunteer their children—negative incentives, of course, we're hardly about to reward the casteless just for accepting their rightful place. Ensure that any child without a brand can be accused of impersonating an upper caste; that's simple enough. Ensure further that a parent who enabled it would obviously face even worse punishment. Go a step further: send in units of the guard at random to sweep Dust Town and make sure nothing untoward is going on (an additional bonus: this would go a long way towards discouraging people of other castes from so much as entering Dust Town, further isolating the casteless). Consider offering a small reward, perhaps, for those who turn in their neighbours—they can always be made into informants, too. And encourage the spread of stories that paint branding babies as "for their own good" (at least an infant won't remember the pain).

That takes care of most of the logistical issues. But what about the physics of tattooing?

Here's my theory: whatever mark they give to infants isn't the same one the adult casteless have. It's something more simple, a basic shape that won't be too distorted by a child's growing face, something geometric that can be used as a building block for the distinctive adult marking. A solid rectangle, maybe—straightforward, but still plenty obvious.

The adult mark doesn't get placed until later: in the mid to late teens, most likely, after the kids are mostly done growing.

There are a couple of ways that could happen. The first is via simple policing: any casteless teenager who finds themselves arrested will also come out of it with their brand updated. Given the amount of prejudice the casteless face from literally everyone else in Orzammar, they wouldn't even need to be doing anything—just being in the wrong area would be enough to get them picked up. That would cover a lot of casteless adolescents, especially since they'd need to be working, most likely, to help support their families—but there would still be others who were left unbranded. How to target the ones who lie low?

Actually, that's simpler than it seems. Remember what I said earlier, about guard units doing random sweeps? Like that—but bigger.

Say, every year, or every two years: a full-blown roundup, digging out everyone in Dust Town, singling out the unbranded teenagers of an appropriate age to forcibly update their tattoos. It would be the production of a full day, maybe two—a large-scale policing event for the guard, carried out when their latest recruits have just graduated and their numbers are at their peak. The guards would be sent in, in force, to thoroughly search every house—it would be a good time to make sure no babies or toddlers had slipped through the cracks, either. Might as well: you've got everyone down there to do the tattooing anyway.

Something like this would have a major effect on casteless culture. For some it might come to be seen as a rite of passage, even. And it ties in with some of my thoughts on another aspect of the casteless brands—the issue of reclaiming. There's an implication that some factions of casteless society (particularly the Carta, or other criminal elements) have made an effort to reclaim their tattoos: adding decoration, more details, colour, full face pieces. Consider the Shaper who gives you the Thief in the House of Learning quest in Origins—he describes the casteless who stole the tome as having tattoos all over his face, "as if he's proud to be casteless" (side note: this is a particular punch in the gut if you are, like me, playing as a Brosca Warden with extra facial tattoos).

So picture this: one day without warning all the casteless are woken up and forced out into the square by the city guard. They're none too gentle, treating them more like animals than people, roughing them up, ransacking their homes in search of anyone hidden. All the older teenagers who don't yet have the adult brand are corralled; everyone else is dismissed. One by one the adolescents are forcibly tattooed; any who fight are beaten, restrained, and tattooed anyway. And at the end of the day, the guards and their tattooists pack up and leave.

Then the Carta comes out. They're gentle—they've been through it themselves, after all, and they know a soft touch will go a lot further than mimicking the guards' brutality would. "You can accept it," they say, "and maybe that'll make your lives easier in the long run—but maybe not. Or you can change it, make it your own." They get out their own needles and inks. They offer touch-ups, or additions, or different colours. They don't restrain anyone, they don't strike too hard or too deep, they take breaks if the pain gets to be too much. They hand around a healing ointment, to stave off infection—a precious, valuable luxury—and maybe they don't look too hard if anyone takes more than they need and steals it home for a relative. They soothe and give advice and make promises.

How many furious and humiliated kids would take them up on it? Probably a lot.

Of course, the Carta aren't the only dwarves who take prominent facial tattoos: there's also the Legion of the Dead. They have a practice of full face tattooing, and their tattoos specifically are a visible representation of their ritual death—the majority of them seem to imitate the Legion heraldry, which is a representation of a dwarven skull. Their tattoos are part of their initiation, most likely a private ritual for the Legionnaires alone that takes place after the funeral has concluded and the mourners have left. It's a way to bond with their new unit, just as the Carta's recruitment of newly branded kids would be.

And for all that dwarves can win honour by entering the Legion, there's still a strong criminal association there—it's rare for anyone to join up except as atonement for a crime. It makes one wonder whether the Carta's tattooing traditions developed independently, or if they were derived from the Legionnaires' traditions, or if the Legionnaires adapted it from the Carta. One certainly imagines a substantial segment of the Legion of the Dead is made up of former casteless, and as far as we know the casteless have always carried a brand.

Either way, what with tattoos so firmly a mark of criminality in dwarven culture, you really have to wonder how a dwarven Warden would react to seeing vallaslin for the first time.


	2. On Casteless Isolation and Carta Governance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussion of fictional classism, exploitation, and dehumanization (once again, inasmuch as that word can be properly applied to a nonhuman race).

Let's discuss the state of the casteless in Orzammar. We know from the games—and from just about every interaction that the castes have with the casteless—that the Assembly takes extensive steps to make sure the casteless are isolated from the rest of society. Nominally, and to the understanding of the general populace, that's because the casteless are impure, rejected by the Stone and the ancestors, and thus need to be kept away from the real people. Why is that so? Well, because it's tradition, of course. The casteless have always been rejected by the Stone, and so it must be true. The future of the dwarves is very much charted by their history.

But the thing is, as we know, it's a lot more complicated than that. Certainly that's why people exclude the casteless—but that's just the surface level, the explanation everyone repeats to make sense of it. It's what they  _believe_ , which makes it true as far as their individual actions are concerned, but it's not the  _reason_.

Last time I was running around Orzammar, I rediscovered an interesting codex that sheds some light on the issue. This is a section from [Codex Entry: The Key to the City](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_The_Key_to_the_City), from the Assembly directive found in Dust Town.

> Your efforts have been exemplary, but these self-proclaimed cartels must defer to the Assembly and restore order. Exclusion from caste and society is no excuse. Perhaps suggest that it would be a simple matter to march on the quarter, or simpler still to withdraw infrastructure support. A tunnel breach would be most unfortunate, but current policy direction prohibits any deals that would legitimize cartel operations. Downward pressure on certain elements of our society has proven useful in shoring up the economy with an excess of affordable labor. It also encourages enlistment in the Legion of the Dead, the one accepted path to partial redemption and a vital force on our weakening front lines. This model suffers when criminals create their own hierarchies with alternative methods of social advancement.
> 
> Every stone has a face that can’t be carved, a side that must be earthward. We need their so-called Dust Town, but it would be inadvisable to include that in your negotiations. We have the utmost faith in you, Capt— (The rest is obscured by bloodstains.)
> 
> _—From a confidential Assembly directive, regarding proliferation of cartels._

The message here is pretty clear: the casteless need to be kept down, because their lack of status is what allows for the status of everyone else. The success of Orzammar's economy is built on the backs of casteless labour, and the casteless desire to prove themselves, to _make_ something of themselves, is what pushes them to enlist in the Legion of the Dead and thus shore up Orzammar's defences. But there's more here that's going unsaid.

Let's detour for a moment. Lots of people have talked about the hypocritical relationship Orzammar has with the surface dwarves. It's something that comes up as soon as anyone stops to question how the dwarves survive underground without farmland, or where they get the materials for their clothes from. There's a codex in Inquisition (also a sidebar in The World of Thedas, vol. 2) that talks about it in fairly explicit terms, in fact—[Codex Entry: Darktown's Deal](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Darktown%27s_Deal), an excerpt from one of Varric's books. Here's a couple of relevant paragraphs (the whole thing is a fair bit longer, I'd recommend looking it over).

> Every dwarf who goes to the surface is stripped of caste, effectively exiled and removed from dwarven society forever. But Orzammar relies on continued relations with these exiles to live. This has created a shadowy area of dwarven trade and politics where the rich, powerful, and elite maintain secret ties to people who, by official decree, no longer exist. And everyone knows what kinds of things lurk in the shadows.
> 
> […]
> 
> The outraged citizens of Orzammar sometimes petition the Assembly to deal with the rampant crime surrounding the black market, and showy displays are made of kicking in the doors to Carta hideouts and razing Dust Town. But the Carta always comes back, because the Assembly always allows it. Too much of Orzammar is dependent on the black market trade, and the nobles know it. They all do business with the Carta. Everyone has a stake in its success. The Carta has a thousand faces above and below the surface—honest merchants and Noble Caste lords and upstanding members of the Merchants Guild—all a cover for the thousands more smugglers, thieves, and murderers in the shadows. The lifeline of Orzammar. Praise the Ancestors.

But here's what isn't often mentioned: it's not just the surfacers. It's not just the Carta, even. There's a parallel hypocrisy in the way Orzammar deals with the entire casteless class.

The casteless are dirty and rejected by the ancestors—but everyone turns a blind eye to the noble hunters. Sure, they make snide remarks, look down on them, call them greedy and grasping and assume they're out to steal, but no one would dream of stopping it from happening entirely. The children borne by noble hunters are too necessary to the dwindling population of the warrior and noble castes. Even the female babies, the ones that would remain casteless, are valuable—after all, they'll need more noble hunters in the next generation, won't they? Noble hunters, properly cleaned up, are even allowed up in the Diamond Quarter, when most casteless are barely even tolerated in the Commons. They're looked down on, but they're needed, even if no one will admit it.

Then there's the Legion. That's where criminals can go to redeem themselves in the eyes of society, and the casteless are all criminals by default. For someone who can't bear children, or who doesn't have a family member who can bear children and thus raise them up, the Legion of the Dead is the only chance open to them to advance in Orzammar's society. And the legion is so necessary, but it's a hard, bleak life. Who would join up if they weren't effectively forced to? In that way the casteless are also taken advantage of—once again needed, now paid a lip service honour, but still looked down on, because everyone knows the Legion is full of criminals and degenerates even if they do keep everyone safe. And it's worth emphasizing that to even get that much respect, the casteless have to literally give up their lives. The only good casteless is a dead casteless, right?

Finally, there's the Carta, and the other enterprising criminals of Dust Town. Varric's codex entry makes it explicit, but even without that we know the Carta serves as intermediaries between the surface and the city, and that they control the black market in Orzammar. We also know, or can infer, from the Orzammar succession quest line, that as long as the Carta stays in their place in Dust Town, the nobles tolerate them—it's only when Jarvia begins making incursions into the Commons that Bhelen and Harrowmont start making noise about beating her back. And even outside of trade, there's all kinds of dirty work the Carta and other criminals will do for someone with the right coin. The nobles need them, and they know it—even as they're decrying casteless criminality on the floor of the Assembly.

So the Assembly has a lot of reasons to try to keep the casteless from integrating with the rest of society (whether or nor they're "good" reasons depends on whether you're talking from a perspective of noble pragmatism or casteless rights advocacy). Without pushing the casteless down they don't have the noble hunters desperate to claw their way out of the slum, or casteless fighters with the incentive to join the Legion of the Dead for redemption, or the criminal element that illicitly keeps the city running. Taking away the personhood of a huge class of people is the perfect way to solve that, if you're not overburdened with pesky little things like scruples.

Here's the thing, though—if you isolate a large group of people, cut them off and reject them from your society, there are two paths open to them. One is the path the Assembly hopes they'll walk: you bear a noble child or join the Legion, you follow the prescribed path from non-personhood to personhood, you play by the rules and hope they'll acknowledge you when you've done enough to shore up their society. That's what happens in Kal'Hirol in Awakening: the casteless fought and died in the evacuation of the city, and you as the Warden bring back word of it to have them honoured in Orzammar. It's supposed to be a victory, but for my Brosca Warden it was brutal, devastating, and hollow—just more proof that the casteless only mean something when they live by Orzammar's rules and die in the doing.

But that's not the only way out, and it's this second way the Assembly does everything in its power to suppress, the way that they're decrying in that writ found in the dirt in Dust Town: you stop buying into their rules, and reject the system wholesale.

Here's something that would be indisputable—the casteless have their own culture. Oh, certainly not a culture as the nobles of Orzammar would see it—no traditions of fine art or prestigious music or classical performance—but those are just the trappings of culture, and only a particular class of it at that. Culture is the way of life, the belief system, the customs that make your group of people distinct from others. The casteless have been isolated; they're distinct by design.

What sort of arts and history and language and craftsmanship they'd have, I'll leave for another chapter—I have a lot of ideas about that and this is long enough already. Instead I'm going to focus on governance and social structure, and what it looks like to create a culture within and yet isolated from the dominant culture. For that, we turn once again to the Carta—because, while noble hunters and the Legion of the Dead are sanctioned methods of advancement within the social structure of Orzammar, the Carta walks a very precarious line between being tolerated by the nobles, and themselves rejecting Orzammar society wholesale.

Take a look at the Key to the City codex again. "Exclusion from caste and society is no excuse." No excise for what? Antisocial behaviour, of course. At least, according to Orzammar's rules—I don't know about you, but being cut off from society and denied not only legitimacy, but  _personhood?_ That seems like an excellent reason to work against society to me. "This model suffers when criminals create their own hierarchies with alternative methods of social advancement." Of course it does: what's the use of joining the Legion of the Dead if you've decided you don't care about winning honour from nobles? "Every stone has a face that can't be carved, a side that must be earthward." That's all well and good for the upper castes—but what do you do when your earthward side, your  _foundation_ , decides it's not going to support you anymore?

The nobles tolerate the Carta, as I've already explored, because they have to—but only up to a point. And the Carta works within that system, because  _they_ have to—they're not so powerful that they can just storm Orzammar and overthrow it entirely (and in truth, the higher up members probably wouldn't want to: they're essentially a little nobility, with power in their own spheres equivalent to that of the ruling class, and their livelihood also depends on buying in to Orzammar's hierarchy). But there's a constant push and pull between the "legitimate" government of Orzammar and the criminal government of the Carta—just as there would be a constant tension between those casteless who want to "make something of" themselves and those who believe it's futile to even try.

And for those who have rejected Orzammar's hierarchy, the Carta would have a natural appeal. What does the Carta care for the nobles? One's much the same as the others, and none of them are worth paying attention to outside of how susceptible they are to bribes (and, in fairness: most of them are susceptible to bribes). And no matter who rules, winning their favour is completely irrelevant when the Carta is both more immediate and more dangerous. The King of Orzammar does not rule in Dust Town; the highest authority there is the boss of the Carta.

So what does their governance look like? Dust Town is a lawless place, we're told—the guard doesn't patrol there, it's rife with criminals, you're as likely to get knifed in the back as you are to walk out alive. Maybe that's true. But the key word in "organized crime" is "organized." A gang with as much reach and influence as the Carta  _must_ be organized, or they'd just fall apart into squabbling factions. And the Carta needs to keep a tight rein on other criminal elements, lest they start muscling in on their territory. The fact of the matter is, despite knowing how dangerous and callous they can be, the people of Dust Town would look to the Carta to keep the peace—certainly more so than the guard.

I'm not saying the leadership would have the people's best interests at heart—mob bosses aren't generally known for taking up that role out of the goodness of their hearts. But the Carta is a vast and far-reaching organization, and most of their members wouldn't even be interacting with the top lieutenants, let alone the boss—it was just Brosca's bad luck to be so personally tied up with Beraht. But everyone else? Well, they probably felt his cruelty a lot less intimately.

Most members of the Carta would spend their time dealing with the mundane, day to day operations of a criminal empire. They'd be patrolling to make sure other criminals aren't getting too uppity. They'd run the protection racket—taking coin from those who work, maybe, but for most of the casteless they more likely take labour, or favours. They'd pay the beggars for information, ask them to spy on people or pass on gossip. They'd run the black market, transport goods, make sales, run shipments, smuggle contraband. It wouldn't surprise me if they even had a policy of distributing food to the most destitute—not so much to help, per se, but so they could call in favours later.

For good or ill, in a place that's been written off by society, organized crime is the force for order. That's the reality of it whether you're seeking advancement through legitimate channels or have rejected it out of hand and invested in criminality instead. Whether or not that's a good thing—well, that would depend on how deeply you've internalized the shame Orzammar wants to instil in its casteless.

Small wonder so many of them join up.


	3. On Casteless Arts and the Oral Culture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been very excited to write this one. It lays out a lot of the key ideas that inform how I interpret the daily lives and culture of the casteless and includes some stuff I've been ruminating on for around a year.
> 
> There are no particular content warnings for this one. Read on!

In my last chapter I talked about the ways in which culture develops when isolated from greater society. I’ve already covered the structure of that culture. Now I’d like to explore the expressions of culture—that is, art, stories, songs, poetry, language, artisanship, and the like.

Note that this chapter, more so than the previous two, is primarily extrapolation and theory, rather than logical expansion of existing canon material. It’s less what I think _is_ true, and more an exploration of what could be (and what I prefer to use in worldbuilding for my own timelines). Some of this has only the most tenuous basis in canon, because that’s all we have to build on.

Let’s start with artisanship, since that’s the most straightforward thing to extrapolate. By “artisanship” I mean crafts that can be artistic but whose primary purpose is practical: textiles, leatherworking, smithing, pottery—the list goes on. In a lot of cases, these are things the casteless would get as castoffs from the upper castes, or through illicit means such as Carta smuggling. Smithing, there would certainly be very little resources for, since competent smithing requires a good deal of specialized equipment—and that’s not even accounting for the status accorded to smiths in traditional dwarven culture, which would likely make it very difficult for the casteless to put a forge together. But even if they don’t typically create new things, the casteless must at least have a way of repairing the things they find, and I do believe they would make some of their own crafts as well.

In the case of textiles, most of the materials available to the casteless would be castoff clothing from the other castes. Much of this material would be worn, torn, or just old—not very sturdy in the longterm, that is. One hypothesizes, then, that the casteless would be practiced at creating their clothing from a patchwork of other items: either stitching two (or more) items of the same type of clothing into a single piece, or repurposing the fabric into smaller pieces that can be sewn together.

And it would look patched together: those with a particular talent for sewing could perhaps match fabrics well enough and stitch finely enough to put together something that looks like the clothing of the upper castes, but most casteless would have to make do with what they could find. Holes in shirts and trousers would be patched with whatever fabrics was on hand. Old, worn fabric would be torn into strips and woven into loose-knit blankets and shawls. Thread would be picked out, unwoven, and repurposed for sewing. The casteless would have to be very good at reusing old materials; otherwise it’s likely most of them would never be able to clothe themselves.

Leatherworking would probably function in much the same way. A lot of dwarven clothing items are made from leather, and on top of that there’s also boots, aprons, and armour for anyone low enough on the Carta chain that they can’t afford smuggled surface imports or illicit dwarven armours. That material, too, would likely be patched together from disparate castoff sources, stitched together with strings made from twisted nug intestines, or whatever leather cord they could find. The armour, in particular, is probably overlapping strips of leather, possibly reinforced with scrap metal; that’s always what I picture for the Duster Leather Armour you find all over the place in Origins.

Whatever their materials, casteless garments probably have quite a distinctive look. The fact is, a patchwork of items is never going to be able to perfectly imitate the styles of the upper castes, no matter how skillfully sewn. Instead I think their clothing and armour conventions would have evolved to emphasize the differences. Casteless leatherworking displays prominent stitching in contrasting colours; casteless clothing is a bright rainbow of intermixed fabrics with visible seams; casteless knitting uses thick, multicoloured yarns in patterns that take advantage of the bulky texture of their repurposed fabrics. What looks stylish in Dust Town is vastly different—and vastly more creative—than what one might see in the Commons or the Diamond Quarter.

Smithing, as I mentioned above, is one of the arts that I think would not be widely practiced by the casteless. However, there would probably be at least a few people in the community who know the basics of repairing metal items—more tinkers than smiths. Like their clothes, casteless utensils, pots, and even weapons would be a patchwork of repairs and cobbled-together pieces, incorporating solder and leather ties, made to stretch as far as they possibly could before they were finally replaced—and even then, someone could probably make use of the materials. Likewise, they probably don’t have much of a tradition of pottery—kilns are large, cumbersome, and difficult to make without resources—but they could make a basic ceramic by mixing clay and ash, which could be used to make simple crockery or to do repairs on castoffs. Those materials, at least, they would likely have in ready supply.

So that’s artisanship—but what about arts? The casteless certainly aren’t going to be carving great murals or tablets or statues: they wouldn’t have the resources for something that large, and even if they did, there’s no way the upper castes would let them keep it. They probably don’t do a huge amount of whittling, either—wood, for the dwarves, is a coveted material only available to the wealthy. They could make small sculptures from clay, however, or carve small pieces from stone or bone. One imagines that much casteless-made jewellery would be carved from bone, as well as toys for their children, household knickknacks, and game pieces (casteless dwarves play dice with nug bones. You heard it here first). But there’s something else they could do, too: easily, cheaply, and without arousing the ire of the upper castes—something, I’ve noticed, that there is precious little of in what we see of dwarven art and architecture in Orzammar. The casteless can paint.

The upper castes, I feel, would look down on mural painting as an art form: it doesn’t have nearly the prestige of working with stone (or Stone), and it isn’t the same kind of precise art that carving is. They would turn up their noses at what they see as a sloppy medium, barely even deserving of being called “art”—after all, if you make a mistake with paint, you can just cover it up with another colour, or daub it off before it dries. But using paints, the casteless could not only imitate the geometric and figurative motifs seen in other dwarven art, but also forge out on their own into more abstract or fluid forms.

They wouldn’t have canvasses (none of the dwarves would, I imagine), and vellum is expensive, but their buildings would make the perfect surfaces for artistic exploration. Their pigments would be made from clays, stone, ash, and other easily accessible natural materials, so they wouldn’t be extremely bright, and they likely wouldn’t have much in the way of blues, greens, or purples. But they would be expansive, unconstrained, and innovative in the way that tradition-wed Orzammar otherwise doesn’t see.

And while casteless buildings being covered with murals is interesting enough on its own, there’s another interesting possibility presented by a prevalence of paints and public art—because the casteless, cut off from greater society and educated only in slapdash fashion, are probably largely illiterate. While it’s assumed for the convenience of game mechanics that a Brosca Warden can read, that can be explained by their being taught by Rica, who received lessons as part of her education as a noble hunter. But aside from noble hunters and the powerful Carta members—effectively a criminal nobility themselves—it’s pretty unlikely many people would know how to read.

So instead of writing messages for each other, they might develop a language of symbols—unobtrusive pictures or shapes that could be worked into any of their murals. Symbols for safe houses, illicit shops, people looking for work or looking to hire, notices of upcoming Carta operations (and warnings to stay out of the way), cautions against the guard… pretty much anything the casteless might need to quietly communicate to each other. Some symbols would be widely known by all the casteless; others might be Carta only, or even personal symbols shared only between a few friends. They could be painted at any size, written on whatever wall they needed to be seen on, understood only by those they were relevant to—and the upper castes would look right past them.

But code symbols wouldn’t be the only cultural outgrowth of a largely illiterate society: the casteless would also have a powerful oral tradition. All cultures have histories and stories that they pass down; cultures that don’t have writing, or where it’s not safe to write, will have other ways. A prominent one is music—the structure of songs tends to make them easy to memorize, and even children can learn complex lyrics from a fairly young age. The casteless probably have a lot of songs, shared among the community, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to hear people singing together while they work. Some of their songs would be stories of their ancestors, stories of resistance or great accomplishment; others would be about surviving their hard lives or finding ways to escape them; still others (probably a lot of others) would be mockery of the upper castes. I feel like a lot of children’s rhymes would be songs making fun of historical nobles.

In addition to singing, they would probably have a variety of simple instruments as well, likely carved from bone like other sculptures or jewellery—little flutes carved from leg bones; bones for drumsticks to beat on hide drums; small bones, sealed in a hollow clay pouch, to serve as a shaker; perhaps even lap harps carved from bone and strung with nug-gut, if they could get a bone large enough. They likely wouldn’t have horns—there don’t seem to be many underground animals that grow them—nor anything that requires a reed to make sound, but percussion, strings, and breath are things they’d have in plenty.

Of course, music isn’t the only aspect of an oral tradition. Storytelling, poetry recitation, folk tales, urban legends, and the rumour mill are all big parts of oral culture as well. The casteless would certainly have storytellers—in fact, I suspect that some of their beggars might be more accurately dubbed as such, and would share stories in exchange for food, clothing, or somewhere to sleep. Folk tales told to children would then be passed along as stories for their own children in turn, and urban legends would circulate among adults and children alike in shifting but coherent forms. And rumour could be used as a tool, either for gathering information, disseminating ideas, or enhancing reputation—something that’s true of any society, but is especially so for those where what people say about you is the sum total of what is known.

There would also certainly be people who memorize poetry—much like music, it has a rhythm that makes it easier to remember and repeat. Most of the dwarven poetry found in the codexes seems to be formatted either as limericks or as haiku, but those are collections of verse that presumably come from the upper and middle castes. The casteless might have their own forms—likely incorporating their own slang, ideas and imagery imported from the surface via the Carta, and non-traditional experimentation that wouldn’t be able to flourish in the tradition-mired forms of upper class Orzammar.

Now here’s where it gets really good. The thing is, people who hear and memorize a lot of poetry are going to be better than average at understanding poetic forms. And people who recite a lot of poetry are going to be better than average at putting together poetry that sounds good when spoken aloud. And when someone understands the structure of poetry, and has memorized a large “data bank” of existing poems, and knows how to put poetry together in a way that flows well, it gets easier and easier for them to not only compose poetry, but to compose _on the fly_. And when you have a group of people together who can all do that sort of thing, they tend to start building off each other, improvising together—and competing.

If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that. That’s how rap battles work. That’s also how flyting works—the ritual tradition of exchanging poetic insults in Old Norse, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon societies. There are similar traditions from around the world—examples I’ve seen cited include Arabic, Japanese, Inuit, Finnish, and a variety of African cultures. It wouldn’t surprise me if virtually any primarily oral culture had a practice of spontaneous competitive composition.

So imagine, if you would, a group of casteless gathered together in whatever passes for a tavern in Dust Town—a circle of tables around an open space, people sitting all around the ring, people gathering at their backs and crowding in to watch. People clapping to keep a rhythm, tapping out a drumbeat or rattling a shaker, people adding a bit of melody with struck harps or tapped fiddles. And in the space at the centre of the circle, a few casteless facing off, reeling off verses in escalating response to each other as gradually the rhythm gets faster.

That’s not a game you’d need money or an elite education for—there are people around the world spitting rhymes to prove that every day. So why should the casteless be any different? There’s a lot more to culture, after all, than people give it credit for. The casteless may not have status or wealth, but their lives aren’t bare and empty.

This is the richness of culture I see when I look at them. What are your ideas?


End file.
